The Mauritius Command

by Patrick O'Brian

  He had begun as soon as they sank Cape Agulhas, and although they were by no means reconciled to the exercise they were used to his ways; they were quite sure what the Commodore would be at at this point in the afternoon watch when they saw the Raisonable signal to the Wasp and then bid the squadron wear together. Up and down the line the bosuns' calls shrilled high and clear, the hands stood poised upon their toes (for the competition between the ships was very keen, the horror of public disgrace very great), and the moment the Raisonable deviated from her line the others began their turn: round they came, as trim as could be, forming the line with their larboard tacks aboard, the wind one point free, a reversed line, with the Otter leading. They had no great press of sail and this was a simple manoeuvre; even so, it was well executed; there was not much amiss with their seamanship, reflected Jack, looking over the taffrail at the Néréide's masts, all in one line, eclipsing those of the Sirius, her next astern. Meanwhile the schooner had cast off the targets, and she was making sail with remarkable diligence, being eager to run out of range as soon as possible.

  It was an understandable eagerness, for as usual the Otter opened a fine brisk fire a little before her guns could really be said to bear, and her wilder shot whipped up the sea between the schooner and the target. Her second broadside was nearer the mark, and might have hit it if the Otters had waited for the top of the roll: her third resembled the first, except that one ball did skip over the target: and she did not manage a fourth. Jack, watch in hand, was calling the figures to the mathematical midshipman he had brought with him when the Boadicea spoke out, pitching her shot a trifle high but sweeping the hypothetical deck; her second broadside struck the enemy square amidships, and with rapturous cries her third and fourth demolished the floating wreckage. 'One minute fifty-five seconds,' wrote Spotted Dick upon his slate, following it with two points of admiration. 'As they bear, Mr Whittington,' called Jack. The Raisonable was understood to play no competitive role in all this: because of her age she could not blaze away with the single, timber-shattering roar of a younger ship, but every third gun of her lower deck, half charged, and several of her lighter pieces produced a slow rolling fire that would have done a certain amount of damage. Far more damage than the full but almost comically inept broadsides of the Néréide: two broadsides only, and those fired so high that no more than a single shot went home—a shot almost certainly fired by one of the quarter-gunners that Jack had most reluctantly sent into her. Then came Sirius, with two deliberate broadsides and then her five aftermost guns as the battered target went astern: slow but quite accurate at this moderate range.

  Jack had neither the time nor the powder for any more. As soon as the guns were housed he signalled Tack in succession and called the schooner under his lee. From the moment they weighed from Simon's Town he had watched the sailing of the ships under his command with a very close attention, but never had he kept his glass so fixedly upon any one of them as now he kept it upon the Wasp as she came racing up close-hauled, throwing white water right down her lee-rail. She was a beautiful craft, beautifully handled, and she sailed closer to the wind than he would have thought possible; yet his anxious, worn expression did not lighten when she rounded to and lay here under the Raisonable's quarter, her captain looking up at her lofty poop with an inquiring face.

  Jack nodded absently to the schooner, told the signal-lieutenant to summon the captain of the Sirius, stepped aft with a speaking-trumpet and hailed the Boadicea, desiring her acting-captain to come aboard. The Commodore received them rather formally in the fore-cabin, where Mr Peter handed Eliot written orders to proceed to the Mauritius in company with the Sirius, there to lie off Port-Louis, the capital and the chief port, in the north-west of the island, and to rendezvous with the rest of the squadron on that station: in the intervening time they were to watch the motions of the enemy and to gain all the information they could. To these orders Jack added a clear direction not to engage in any action unless the odds were heavily in their favour, together with some advice about arriving off Sable Point after dark and sending in boats to look into the harbour at crack of dawn, so that they could pull out against the sea-breeze. Then, in his care for the Boadicea, he was going on to beg Eliot not to carry too great a press of sail, not to set his royals—a spar carried away in these latitudes was a terrible loss—she must be humoured, not drove—when he realized that he sounded more like a mother-hen than was quite right. He stifled his recommendation about the Boadicea's starboard cathead, saw them over the side, watched their ships steer north, and went below again, going right aft to the great cabin, where Stephen sat at a table, encoding letters on paper of surprising thinness.

  'The great advantage of these ark-like vessels,' observed Stephen, 'is that one can at least speak in privacy. The Admiral, with his luxury of dining-room, bedroom, antechamber, forecabin, and then this magnificence with the balcony behind, could riot at his ease; the Commodore can freely speak his mind. A mind that is, I fear, oppressed by melancholy thoughts?'

  'Yes: commodious, ain't it?' said Jack, stepping out on to the stern-gallery, from which he could see the Wasp, rising and failing ten feet on the long smooth swell and shivering her foretopsail from time to time to keep her pace down to that of the two-decker. Coming back he said, 'Stephen, I do so hate this vile scheme of yours.'

  'I know you do, my dear,' said Stephen, 'You have frequently mentioned it. And each time I have replied, that in the first place the contacts and the information I seek are of essential importance; and in the second, that the risk is negligible. I walk two hundred paces along a strand clearly defined by palm-trees; I call at the second house I see—a house of which I have an accurate drawing—I make a contact of inestimable value, receive my information, deliver these documents, whose extreme tenuity, you see'—holding them out—'renders them edible, as tradition doth require—I walk back to the boat and so to your swift-sailing machine, to join you, with the blessing, for breakfast. I promise not to linger, Jack, though La Réunion is another Ophir, to the philosophic mind.'

  Jack paced up and down: all that Stephen said was perfectly reasonable. Yet not so many years ago Jack had fetched him out of Port Mahon more dead than alive, Port Mahon in Minorca, where he had been caught on a secret mission, interrogated with all the barbarity of the Inquisition, and very nearly destroyed.

  'Minorca was entirely different,' said Stephen. 'In that case I had been undermined at home. Here the possibility does not exist.'

  'It is not only that,' said Jack, coming to a halt in front of a chart of the coast of La Réunion. 'Just look at these God-damned reefs. Think of the surf. I have told you again and again, Stephen, these inshore waters are hellish dangerous—reefs everywhere, half of 'em uncharted, the most tremendous surf. I know what I am talking about. I was here as a boy. There is scarcely a beach where you can land in safety, even when the swell is more moderate by half , To get into your Petite Anse you must run through a gap in the reef not a cable's length across even at high tide, by moonlight. And what if this Company's chap don't find it? He is no pilot for these waters: admits it candidly.'

  'The alternative is to go in the Otter. Clonfert does know these shores; and he has a native pilot. And since I shall have to spend some time in the Otter sooner or later, I am eager to know her captain. Much will depend upon our understanding.'

  'Certainly he knows this coast,' said Jack, 'but then the coast knows him. He has been in and out a score of times on this east side alone. The Otter is very recognizable, and if any fishing-boat or aviso or watchman on the cliffs sees her standing in, then every soldier and militiaman on the island will be running about, shooting the first thing that stirs. No: if it has to be, then the schooner is the right choice. Her captain is a steady young fellow and a good seaman; nothing flash or gimcrack about him or his Wasp. Besides, there is the time.'

  'Sure, I should prefer the schooner. She leaves us at Rodriguez for Bombay, as I understand it, and that will preserve my character a little lon
ger.'

  'Well,' said Jack in the most unwilling voice. 'But I tell you, Stephen, I shall give him absolute orders to return immediately if he cannot make out his leading marks at once, or at the least sign of movement ashore. And Stephen, I must tell you this, too: if the scheme goes wrong, I cannot land a party to bring you off.'

  'It would be madness to attempt any such thing,' said Stephen placidly; and after a slight pause, 'Honest Jack, would it be uncivil to remind you, that time waits for no man? This also applies, they tell me, to the tide.'

  'Then at least,' cried Jack, 'I can send Bonden with you, and have a carronade mounted in the boat.'

  'That would be kind; and might I suggest that black men for the boat's crew would be a diabolically cunning stroke, by way of amusing the enemy? For we must assume that he sees in the dark, the creature.'

  'I shall attend to it this minute,' said Jack, and he left Stephen to his encoding.

  A little before four bells in the afternoon watch Dr Maturin was lowered like a parcel on to the heaving deck of the Wasp, where Bonden seized him, cast off the five fathoms of stout line that had held him motionless (no one had the least opinion of his powers of self-preservation, at sea) and led him aft, whispering, 'Don't forget to pull off your hat, sir.'

  It was a round hat of French manufacture, and Stephen took it off to the schooner's quarterdeck and to her captain with something of an air; then turning about with the intention of waving it to Jack he found that he was gazing over a broad lane of sea at the Raisonable's stolid figurehead. The schooner had already crossed the two-decker's bows, and she was now flying goose-winged towards the clouds that hung over La Réunion.

  'If you will step this way, sir,' said the captain of the Wasp, 'I believe we shall find our dinner ready.'

  At the same moment Killick mounted to the poop of the Raisonable, where Jack was staring after the schooner, and stated, with something of his old acerbity, that 'the gentlemen were treading on one another's toes in the halfdeck this ten minutes past: and his honour still in his trousers.' Abruptly Jack realized that he had forgotten his invitation to the wardroom, that he was improperly dressed—north of Capricorn once more he had reverted to the free and easy ducks—and that he was in danger of committing unpunctuality. He darted below, huddled on his uniform, and shot into the great cabin just as five bells struck. Here he received his guests, the sailors in their best blue coats, the soldiers in their scarlet, and all of them red faced in the heat, for they had had their finery on for the last half hour at least: presently he led them to the dining-table, where the skylight admitted the rays of the ardent sun, and they grew redder still. At the beginning of a cruise, and often right through it, these feasts, theoretically the gathering of equals for social intercourse but in fact the almost obligatory attendance of men belonging to different steps of a rigid and never-forgotten hierarchy, tended to be ponderous affairs. Jack was perfectly aware of it, and he exerted himself to give some semblance of spontaneity to his entertainment. He tried very hard, and at one point, feeling for the sufferings of the Marine captain whose stock was bringing him nearer and nearer to a cerebral congestion, he even though of bidding them take off their heavy coats: but that would never do—a disproportioned thought indeed—for although he naturally liked his guests to enjoy themselves, he must not conciliate their goodwill by the least improper concession; they must enjoy themselves within the limits of naval convention, and these limits certainly did not extend to turning the cabin into a bawdy-house. He confined himself to ordering the awning, removed for Stephen's aerial voyage, to be rigged again, and water to be dashed upon the deck.

  Although his heart was not in it, he laboured on: yet artificial conviviality is rarely infectious, and still they sat, hot, prim, polite. Convention required that no man but Jack Aubrey should initiate any conversation, and since they had not yet taken the measure of their new Commodore they obeyed it religiously. Presently he began to run short of topics, and he was reduced to urging them to eat and drink. For his own part he could only go through the motions of eating—his stomach was quite closed—but as a grateful coolness began to come down from the shaded skylight, wafted by the unvarying south-east trade, the bottle went about more briskly. Even before the port came to the table each man had a shining, glazed appearance, a tendency to stare and hold himself very straight, and each man behaved with even greater care as the decanter went its rounds—tolerably dismal rounds, as Jack could not but inwardly confess.

  Dinner in the Wasp's low triangular cabin was a very different matter. Since this coming night's activity called for a mind as clear as it could be Stephen had begged for thin cold coffee: Mr Fortescue drank no wine at any time, so the bottle he had provided for his guest stood untouched between the lime-juice and the tall brass pot while the two of them devoured a great mound of curry so Vesuvian that it paled the tropic sun. Each had early discovered the other's passionate concern with birds; and now, after a modest though fully detailed account of petrels he had known, Mr Fortescue observed that there was nothing like a sailor's life for bringing a man acquainted with the world.

  'Sir, sir,' cried Stephen, waving a Bombay duck, 'how can you speak so? Every ship I have sailed upon might have been called the Tantalus. They have carried me to remote countries, within reach of the paradise-bird, the ostrich, the sacred ibis; they have set me down in a variety of smelly and essentially identical havens; and then, almost without exception, they have hurried me away. The wealth of the Indies is within my grasp, and I am hurried away to another stinking port a thousand miles away, where exactly the same thing occurs. In candour I must not deny that the intervening ocean may reveal wonders that more than compensate the tedium of one's confinement, the Judaic ritual of life aboard—I have beheld the albatross!—but these are fleeting glimpses: we know nothing of the birds' economy, the interesting period of their loves, their solicitude for their young, their domestic tasks and cares. Yet all this is just at hand, attained by enormous expense of spirit and of the public treasure: and it is thrown away. No: I can conceive of no more deeply frustrating life for a naturalist than that of a sailor, whose lot it is to traverse the world without ever seeing it. But perhaps, sir, you have been more fortunate?'

  Mr Fortescue, though freely admitting the justice of Dr Maturin's observations in general, had indeed been more fortunate, particularly in respect of the great albatross, Diomedea exulans, to which the Doctor had so feelingly referred: he had been cast away on Tristan da Cunha, where he had lived with and upon albatrosses, thousands and thousands of albatrosses, to say nothing of the penguins, terns, skuas, prions, the indigenous gallinule and a hitherto nondescript finch. He had sat with albatrosses right through their incubation; he had weighed, measured, and eaten their eggs; he had attended to their nuptial ceremonies; and, having been cast away with a piece of pencil and the Complete Practical Navigator, whose blank pages served for notes and measurements, he had, to the best of his poor abilities, drawn them.

  'And were you indeed able to make illustrated notes?' cried Stephen, his eyes gleaming. 'How I wish, oh how I wish, that you might be persuaded to communicate them, at some not too distant time!'

  As it happened, said Mr Fortescue, reaching for the book, they were just at hand, entirely at Dr Maturin's service; and he rather thought that there might be some specimens—eggs, skins, and bones—in the locker upon which he sat.

  They were still with their albatrosses at nightfall, when the chaotic mountains of La Réunion stood black against the afterglow, and when Jack, with the taste of brass in his mouth and an aching head, began his pacing of the poop, glancing westward at each turn, although there could not be the slightest chance of seeing the Wasp much before dawn. It was a pacing that continued as the stars swept widdershins round the southern sky and watch succeeded watch: nervous and uneasy at first, it settled into a mechanical to and fro of his body, leaving his mind to run clear. By this stage he was fairly peaceful, and between watching the stars he ran over his calc
ulations, always coming up with the same comforting result: La Réunion lay at the apex of a triangle whose base was the squadron's course during the afternoon and then the night, its southern arm the Wasp's path taking Stephen in, an arm some fifty miles long. He had kept the squadron under topsails alone, and having checked the rate of sailing each time the log was heaved he was confident that they would have run off eighty miles at about four bells in the morning watch, reaching the point at which the northern arm of the triangle, that of the schooner bringing Stephen back, should meet the base, making a neat isosceles of the whole. In these seas, with their perfectly steady wind, such calculations could be made with remarkable accuracy; and here the only important variable was the time Stephen spent ashore, which Jack provisionally set at three hours.

  The middle watch wore on: once a flying squid struck against the great stern-lantern: otherwise the quiet nightroutine of the ship moved along its invariable course. The wind sang an even note in the rigging, the water slipped along the side, the phosphorescent wake stretched out, a straight line broken by the bow-wave of the Otter, two cables' lengths astern; and at each stroke of the bell the sentinels called out from their stations, 'All's well', 'All's well', right round the ship and up and down the squadron.